News + Events

Adventive America: Follow the Plants

Thursday, January 29, 2026 - Friday, January 30, 2026

An interdisciplinary symposium organized by Catherine Seavitt, Meyerson Professor and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, Adventive America places the forthcoming 250th anniversary of the United States into a broader international context by examining plants and their agency in nation-building. This nontraditional lens explores collectors, collections, and global botanical exchanges between the United States, Indigenous nations, Britain, Spain, Japan, and China, from the early American republic to the present day. Whether shipped in transatlantic Bartram’s boxes in the eighteenth century, showcased at the 1876 Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, emergent in the weedy ballast grounds along the Delaware River, or exchanged as part of the traditional seed-saving practices of Indigenous peoples or immigrant communities, plants from around the globe serve as proxies for our own international migrations and as carriers of cultural meaning in our landscapes. “Following the plants” reveals fraught layers of transnational and ethnobotanical relations and upends false binaries of what it means to be native or alien, exotic or adventive, in the ongoing construction of nationhood.  

Join the McHarg Center's second annual Anne Whiston Spirn lecture by artist Janet Echelman, who will present her recently published compendium Radical Softness: The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman.

An interdisciplinary symposium that brings together experts from the worlds of wildfire adaptation, fire management, design, forest management and sustainable forestry to explore the interlinked challenges of designing and managing landscapes for fire resilience in the face of a changing climate. Organized by Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Nicholas Pevzner. 

The Department of Landscape Architecture seeks qualified applicants for selection as the McHarg Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year. The application deadline is Wednesday, December 31, 2025.